AAPRC Weekly: Les Payne
Les Payne
Syndicated Columnist
New York Newsday
NYC
As the first person in his family to go to college, Les Payne felt an obligation to make the most of the opportunity. Though he’d wanted to be a writer since the tenth grade, he thought it more important that he choose a career in which he could make a living. He began his education at the University of Connecticut as an engineering major, not finding the courage to follow his passion and switch to English until his junior year. It broke his parents’ hearts but turns out it was a good move.
Armed with his English degree and his love of writing, Payne would go on to become one of the most formidable journalists of his generation. Right out of college, though, it was unclear how the Connecticut native would even manage to get his first job. “Newspapers were essentially closed to Black folks when I graduated in 1964,” says Payne. “I was in Hartford, Connecticut and there were two newspapers and neither one had ever hired a Black reporter…There were some 1800 daily [mainstream] newspapers at that time, and I’d never seen a black reporter.”
Faced with a closed door to his chosen career, Payne did what a lot of Black men of his era did––he joined the Army. During his five years in the military, Payne rose to the rank of captain and commanded an anti-aircraft missile battery. He also found his way into the Army’s version of journalism, serving two years as an information officer. During Vietnam he ran a newspaper and wrote speeches for General William C. Westmoreland.
As an information officer, Payne also interacted with civilian journalists and developed a network of contacts among U.S. newspapers. Still, it wasn’t his contacts so much that helped Payne with his first civilian job. It was the Watts riots of 1965. The aftermath of that turmoil had cracked open the doors of mainstream papers. “The riots were covered so poorly that the official report said that newspapers--if they expected to cover urban America--would have to do something about its lack of Black reporters,” Payne recalls.
So newspapers began hiring Black reporters, and in 1969, Payne was hired at New York’s Newsday. To say that Payne made the most of this opportunity would be an understatement. Just five years into his career at Newsday, Payne was part of a team of reporters who put together the 1974 special report, “The Heroin Trail.'' The 33-part series traced the flow of heroin from the poppy fields of Turkey to the veins of drug addicts in metro New York. Payne spent more than six months in Europe on the story, reporting from ten cities across the continent. “The Heroin Trail” won a Pulitzer and was published in book form.
Payne’s impressive list of journalistic milestones went on to include investigative reports on Long Island migrant farm workers, involuntary sterilization, illegal immigrants, The Black Panther Party, and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Payne wrote on the Symbionese Liberation Army and the kidnapping of heiress Patricia Hearst, eventually authoring The Life and Death of the SLA, a book about his investigative account of the revolutionary band that terrorized the West Coast.
As a foreign correspondent, he reported extensively from Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. He came within a hair’s breadth of winning his second Pulitzer––the 1978 prize for foreign reporting––for his 11-part series on the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto, South Africa uprisings. Payne’s writing was so powerful the apartheid government in Pretoria barred him from returning to the country. Still, Payne went back in 1985 and again in 1990, upon the release of Nelson Mandela, each time writing about the political and social changes in that nation. In 1978, 1979 and 1980, Payne traveled to Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) to report on the military and political developments there, becoming the first American journalist to visit areas held by guerrillas. He has returned to Africa again and again, to more than a dozen countries including Nigeria, Uganda, Mozambique and Kenya.
In 1980, Payne added editorial writing to his already impressive portfolio. Like everything else that he’s attempted, Payne excelled as a columnist, earning a raft of awards, including the 1984 UPI Award for Best Commentary, the 1986 ASNE Citation for Column Writing, the 1987 and 1988 Commentary Award from the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and several Associated Press Awards for column writing. Payne’s column has been syndicated by Tribune Media Services since 1985.
In addition to his awards for editorial writing, Payne’s other honors include the $10,000 World Hunger Media Award from the United Nations, the Howard University Journalism Prize, and scores of other prizes. In short, Payne and his news staffs at Newsday––where he is now associate managing editor for national, science, and international news, and manager of the paper’s Queens edition––have won every major award in journalism, including three recent Pulitzer Prizes.
Journalists are typically journeymen, changing news organizations when new opportunities present themselves. In this area, as in so many others, Payne is a notable exception. He’s been at Newsday for nearly 35 years and counting and the reason is simple. Every time he got ready to leave he got a more interesting job in the newsroom. Outside of the paper, Payne has explored television and radio with numerous appearances on shows ranging from “Nightline” to “Meet the Press.” In 1981, 1982 and 1996, he served as a judge on the panel that selected the News and Documentary Emmys for the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He has served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize selection committee, and is the Inaugural Professor for the David Laventhol Chair at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
What’s next for Newsday’s uberjournalist? “The next challenge is, I guess, books,” Payne muses. “I’m finishing a biography of Malcolm X that I’ve been working on for some time.”
When he’s not working, Payne, who lives with his wife, Violet, in Huntington, NY, collects art and first edition books, but mostly, it seems, Payne loves to travel. He has spent extensive amounts of time in China and Africa. “I’ve been to 25 countries in Africa,” says Payne. “I like South Africa. I like Zimbabwe. I like Kenya. I like Senegal. My travel in Africa I find rewarding in just about all quadrants, both in terms of learning and enjoyment.”
In part of an outcropping of his experiences as a journalist, Payne and his wife, Violet, did what they could to shape their three nowgrown children into citizens of the world. “My wife was pregnant with our second child when we were traveling to Turkey, Africa, the Caribbean,” Payne recalls. “We spent a Christmas in Jamaica. Spring in Senegal. They’ve seen Kenya, China and Russia…I think that’s one of the things parents should do for children, give them a world view.”
This year is a particularly heavy news cycle–-scandals, elections, war, economic turmoil. Are there any issues that you think aren't getting enough coverage and that you hope to address?
In the news cycles you mentioned there are spokes, and critical ones, that just don't get enough sustained attention. We do drive-bys that don't drive home to the public the truth at the root of the matter. Despite coverage, for example, many still believe, falsely, that Iraq was linked to Al Qaeda and events of September 11; that President Bush's WMD [weapons of mass destruction] claims somehow constituted a credible trigger for war; that the U.S. economy is rebounding despite historic––and willful––deficits; that Bush/Cheney won the 2000 election fair and square. This goes to the point of insufficient committed coverage. As for omission, the sustained attack against Black men in America tops the list of issues that are not covered save in an indirect, anecdotal, piecemeal way. This is shameful and tragic stuff.
I think it's safe to say that you are, arguably, one of the most accomplished journalists of your generation. In the wake of your success, what do you see as your responsibility to the profession? To readers?
My responsibility to the profession is to help prepare the generations behind me to make a better mess of things than we have managed to do. As for readers, my responsibility is to ferret out relevant information from sources no matter how secretive, test it factually and pass it along within context. In short, to tell readers the truth.
Is there any work that you're most proud of, that you consider especially significant?
Good fortunes--and my mother’s prayers--have allowed me to witness significant events all over the world. I'm most proud of the times when, by some stroke of luck, I got the story right. It clicked with my coverage of South Africa, starting with the 1976 Soweto uprising running through Nelson Mandela's ost-prison years as president and beyond. In the steel jaws of an apartheid state the Boers said would last 1,000 years, I learned that history is a living organism ever changing. Other high points include: an investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King; my book on the Symbionese Liberation Army; the investigation of the illicit global flow of heroin, but why go on.
Have you ever expressed an opinion in your editorial writing that you came to regret?
Yes. I called George C. Wallace, the former governor of my home state, an Alabama "snake" upon his death. I should have called him a gutless scoundrel of an S.O.B. Snakes serve a useful purpose on this planet.
You started your career in journalism in the 1960s, when it was next to impossible for African-Americans to get hired in mainstream news outlets (until the aftermath of the Watts riots). From your perspective as a veteran journalist and a news manager, are you optimistic about diversity in American journalism?
In journalism, as in life, Blacks will achieve what they demand without compromise. Once we understand how vital journalism is to our interests, indeed our survival, we will walk hard and fear no goddamn evil. This seizing of the time, as Frederick Douglass promised, will demand struggle, a struggle that will alter the power equation in this republic. Those now in power are mere creatures of survival; they will do anything to survive. They will even do right if they're forced to. Doing right by Blacks must be made a condition of survival. My optimism springs eternal at the precise moment Blacks come to this realization.
Over the past several years, a number of high profile journalists have been caught in startling deceptions. Have these incidents affected the way you manage your news staff?
No. Good management will continue to weed out the Jack Kellys and the excesses of the Judy Millers. The mistakes and misdeeds of these white journalists need not stigmatize other journalists of their race.
What's the single best piece of advice you have for young journalists?
Work smart.
Do you have a journalistic idol? Is there anyone after whom you model yourself?
Yes. William Monroe Trotter. However, I must say that I greatly admire the dogged honesty of I. F. Stone, the style of Murray Kempton and the "slapstick vigor" of H. L. Mencken.
What does a typical day look like for you?
Manning the burners on an eight-burner stove.
I'm basically shy and straight as an arrow.
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